Ok so a month ago I picked up Dr. Thomas P Lowry's The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War. With Christmas and then the snowstorms around here I haven't had time to do more than skim through (gotta say this Reverend Richmond and his infatuation with a Rosa Bielaski certainly makes him sound like a piece of work, probably would get a restraining order against him these days; and the suggested amputation of a certain part of the female anatomy to "cure" her of the sin of masturbation is a pit cringe worthy). Anyway, yesterday I picked up the book and began flipping though it, more concerned with trying to look up some particular individuals from the index than in anything inparticular, when I came across something on Jackson I'd never heard of. A General Ezra Carman makes the claim that while at West Point Jackson father an illegitimate child. Supposedly Jackson frequently sent presents and money to the kid, the existence of whom was supposedly confirmed by a Major Jedediah Hotchkiss and a Asher Wterman Harman. Supposedly everyone in Jackson's military family knew the child existed and Jackson spoke often of the. But Dr. Rorbert L Dabney, when writing his Life of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) refused to acknowledge this idea according to Carman.

Now my question is, does anyone know if this is true? I know Jackson had two kids, a stillborn son with his first wife who died in childbirth and his daughter Julia with his second wife. But what little I've seen trying to look it up so far doesn't suggest this could be possible.

Or could it be the illegitimate chid was actually his nephew? Carman claims Jackson seduced a young woman at or near Beverly, Virginia (West Virgina today). Jackson's sister Laura was 19 when she gave birth to Thomas Jackson Arnold in Beverly in 1845, the year before Jackson graduated from West Point. According to the VMI page on Jackson's geneology (http://www.vmi.edu/archives.aspx?id=4927), the siblings were close before the war and often wrote each other while he was a cadet. Her son would certainly fit the claim of having a child with a young woman and Jackson's giving presents and money to the child.

If he did have an illegitimate child who was so well known about, then surely that kid would have been written about. I mean military family doesn't nessecarily mean just Confederates. What about those who were in his military family before the war, some of them went North. And some of them probably hated Jackson so if they knew about this child then wouldn't they want to publish it to defame him? Carman himself was a Federal General, though it doesn't look like he ever served in the Reguar Army at anytime before the war and probably had no connection to Jackson.

Ok, now what I've gotten off the above links the afforementioned military family was just Confederates. But that first thread has me asking how long cadets were in West Point for each year as 20 years before 1863 would have been 1843. Jackson began at West Point in 1842, would he only have taken two months of classes so that he could have ten months off to serve as "constable of Lewis County?" 1843 would certainly be during his time at West Point, cooperating what Carman had said about when the child had been born. But everthing I'm finding, except for the 20 years before 1863 and the name of the supposed mother, keeps me coming back to the idea that the illegitimate child was actually his newphew's birth.

Of course twenty years may not actually be twenty-years, it does some some twenty years before, that could be twenty years ago or just over or under twenty years before.

My name is Tim Carson. My great grandmother told me that her mother Ocie Jackson(Unsure of Jackson name connection) Passed to her as a child and young adult the same information that her mother before her passed that we had descended from Stonewall Jackson via a Cherokee woman that he had fathered a illegitimate child with . She said it was passed down between mother and child. I may never know if this is true but to her it was just the way it was.
ill post Ocie's info for research. She was half Cherokee.